Low and Slow...a few quotes to ponder | Becoming Book Club

General

Jul 6

How ya doing, my friends?This week we slowed down a bit to review some of the chapters we have been blowing through in our Becoming Book Club. It's good to allow deep content to marinate in our souls, and holla' at ya girl because Piper is FULL of deep content. I feel we often over stimulate our souls with such speedy exposure in this day in age we come to the point of numbing. Nothing could penetrate our racing heart if it wanted to because we refuse to slow down enough to think through how we really do feel about what we are reading or absorbing. I want this book to be different. I want us to be intersected in a way we didn't anticipate and blown away by the glory and grace of obtaining the Real Joy of God. As promised, I've pulled out my favorite quotes from the chapters we have read so far in John Piper's book "When I Don't Desire God"....Chapter One:

"This will happen when Christians don't just say that Christ is valuable, or sing that Christ is valuable, but truly experience in their hearts the unsurpassed worth of Jesus with so much joy that they can say, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" {Phil 3:8}.....And this joy will hold us and keep us, if we have tasted it and fought to make it the supreme experience of our lives. Christ is supremely glorious and supremely valuable. Therefore he is worth the fight." {page 21}

Chapter Two:

"Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions - they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God. But having made my defense, I say again: God and God alone is the final, ultimate goal of our quest. All that God is for us in Jesus is the Object of our quest for joy. When I speak of fighting for joy, I mean joy in God, not joy without reference to God. When I speak of longing for happiness, I mean happiness in all that God is for us in Jesus, not happiness as physical or psychological experience apart from God. Whether we are desiring or delighting, the end of the experience is God." {page 31}

Chapter Three:

`"The life of joy in God is not a burdened life. It is an unburdened life. The fight for joy is the struggle to trust God with the burdens of life. It's a fight for freedom from worry. It's a fight for hope and peace and joy, which are all threatened by unbelief and doubt about God's promises. And since freedom and hope and peace and joy are good, the fight to preserve them is a good fight." {page 38}

Chapter Four:

"Therefore, believing that joy in God is a gift from God is essential in our calling to live for the glory of God. It shapes all our other strategies. It makes them humble. It makes them into acts of faith. In everything we do in our quest for joy we are praying and trusting the grace of God for a gift. May this truth liberate the despairing soul and humble the proud." {page 55}

Chapter Five:

"Make and trust a blind idol, and you become blind. Apply that principle to the modern world and think of idols of our own day. What do we make and what do we trust? Things. Toys. Technology. And so our hearts and our affections are like toys. The result is that we are easily moved and excited by things, computers, cars, appliances, entertainment media. They seem to fit the shapes in our hearts. They feel good in the tiny spaces they have made. But in this readiness to receive pleasure from things, we are ill-shaped for Christ. He seems unreal, unattractive. The eyes of our hearts grow dull.......Without the work of our omnipotent internal Eye Surgeon we would remain blind and unable to see. Oh, how we need the gift of spiritual sight! Whatever joy we have without this sight would not be spiritual joy. It would not be a spontaneous response to seeing the beauty of Christ. And therefore it would not honor Christ. It would be superficial and fleeting." {page 68}

Chapter Six: